35 Inspirational Alan Watts Quotes On Success

Alan Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master’s degree in theology. May his quotes inspire you to live in the present and live your dreams.

1. “When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.” Alan Watts

2. “We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” Alan Watts

3. “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” Alan Watts

4. “Man suffers only because he takes seriously.” Alan Watts

5. “Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.” Alan Watts

6. “Don’t hurry anything. Don’t worry about the future. Don’t worry about what progress you’re making. Just me entirely content to be aware of what is.” Alan Watts

7. “This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” Alan Watts

15. “You don’t look out there, you look in you.” Alan Watts

18. “Everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” Alan Watts

19. “The art of living is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.” Alan Watts

20. “The most dangerous risk of all: the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” Alan Watts

21. “Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.” Alan Watts

22. “When a bird sings, it doesn’t sing for the advancement of music.” Alan Watts

23. “If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you’ll be spending your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing, in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things which you don’t like doing. Which is stupid.” Alan Watts

24. “Nothing is permanent.” Alan Watts

25. “The future is a concept, it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be because time is always now. That’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.” Alan Watts

26. “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” Alan Watts

27. “Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.” Alan Watts

28. “I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.” Alan Watts

29. “Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.” Alan Watts

30. “There never is, or was, or will be anything except the present.” Alan Watts

31. “Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.” Alan Watts

32. “The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.” Alan Watts

33. “The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.” Alan Watts

34. “No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.” Alan Watts

35. “Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.” Alan Watts

My name is Asad Meah, I am the CEO & Founder of AwakenTheGreatnessWithin. I am a dreamchaser who has gained a wealth of knowledge in entrepreneurship and personal development over the past five years through self-education. My mission is to inspire millions of people to become entrepreneurs by awakening their minds to their greatness that resides within them.